Anyone tried eatthismuch.com?

Lately I've been looking for ways to be more on top of the logistics of finding healthy recipes, shopping for, preparing and eating a massive quantity of food (I'm highly ectomorphic). I started a different thread to tackle these logistical challenges in terms of batch cooking, which has more or less followed a cook-for-the-freezer style approach to meal planning, drawing heavily on books like "Don't Panic: Dinner's in the Freezer" by Suzie Martinez which can be found here:

And it seems pretty amazing. It plans a weeks worth of meals to fit nutritional and caloric parameters you define and then sends you a shopping list every week telling you exactly what you need to buy. It's also super customizable based on how much time you have to cook different meals and how complex you let the recipes get.

I'm very tempted to try it out, but it definitely seems like the sort of thing you have to commit to in an all-or-nothing sort of way. Has anyone used it - what do you think?

I haven't used it, but I checked out the link. Looks like a pretty cool service and I may check it out. I hate to shop and cook, so this would make the process easier and more streamlined. Thanks for sharing.

- They let you control the macros and even warn you that this might reduce variety... great! Choosing 30% fats alone should reduce overall volume of the diet and require less appetite- They let you define whether you want to cook or not for a given meal type... excellent! This simplifies the logistics of those who don't want to cook- They let you choose the number of meals per day from 3 to 9. Choosing 9 meals should reduce the portions

Still I think the generated diet demands too much appetite. I experimented with a 5000Kcal diet and that would require a shitload more eating than when I was doing a 6000Kcal diet. Even the < 4000Kcal generated diet required more eating and more complicated logistics.

Overall it's a great resource to have if you can't find a good sports dietitian. Just watch out as the site doesn't yet have an appetite parameter which is a must if you are an ecto.

bachian saidOverall it's a great resource to have if you can't find a good sports dietitian.

Seems like the web site would be easier to work with compared to a sports dietitian since you can tweak lots of things on a daily basis or whenever you want. And $7 monthly ($84 yearly) doesn't seem too bad; I was using MeetUp not long ago and I think they were charging me $70 every 6 months (it's now either $10 or $15 a month).

My interest in it is just as a way to aquire a good repertoire of quick, simple-to-prepare meals and to calibrate my gut sense of what's enough food/healthy-enough.

I love MyFitnessPal for that reason, as it really helped me develop a sense of how many calories/macros are in many foods. Although it's way too laborious of a process to enter all that data every day of the year, just sticking to it religiously for a week is a good learning experience. I think of this as MyFitnessPal working in the opposite direction, starting with some nutritional parameters and telling me what fits that.

Likewise, in regards to apetite, because I'm always just eyeballing whether a meal is going to contain enough calories/protein as it is, I actually don't have a good sense of what the *minimum* requirements per meal actually are. Only consuming what I actually need to fit my goals might reduce the amount that I feel like I'm force-feeding myself and make the meal schedule easier to stick to (and lower in fat) over the long run. Even if that means I end up consuming fewer calories starting out, I can slowly dial up my caloric goals over time.

The more I look at all the features and design of this thing the more impressed I am, but the biggest sticking point for me (other than the less than refined grocery list setup) is that, except for lunch leftovers, you still end up having to prepare every individual meal. I would much rather decrease my overall cook/prep time by cooking in large batches, but I figure I can easily do this by just multiplying a single day's suggested recipes and disregarding it's advice for the other days.

I'm going shopping tomorrow to try it out so I'll let you know how it goes.

Well, I don't necessarily. I just meant that I don't trust my guestimation not to skew towards a higher percentage of fats than I intend to hit relative to the other macros. Although I suppose for the purposes of bulking it really isn't that important to hit any magic ratio really. I'm just uptight.